Digital Plastique: Simon Ingram

All of the works in Simon Ingram’s Digital Plastique began as drawings made on an Android phone. These drawings are made by Ingram in-between times, while he is waiting or when gaps open up in a day. Untitled (Waterview Skatepark), is one example of a composition made by swiping and scrubbing across a screen while simultaneously occupying a social space. This leads to paintings made wet on wet by a painting robot in a collaborative way. Ingram works back into the painting, adding a new layer with this machine or by editing an area by repainting in the ground by hand and then having the machine work back into this in turn. The drawings are opened up and re-worked, sometimes, elements within the drawing are copied and repeated. What starts in a series of at times distracted gestures inevitably resolves in hours of negotiation with the machine and its errant capacities.

Plastique is a French colloquialism for plastic explosive and this term touches on the notion that Ingram wanted to up-end the conceptual and data-driven logics of his Radio Paintings (2011) by making a series of compositions that are un-thought and wandering. At the same time, the compositions borrow from the language of the sketch, tree maps, the Venn diagramme, and geometry. The quality of plasticity played in Ingram's mind; the changeability of our brains, the practice of painting, and of the digital tools used to do so.